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Alien brains boost American economy

The US is experiencing a "brain gain", with more than 1 million skilled
immigrant workers competing for 120,000 permanent US resident visas each year,
a report from three US universities suggests. Researchers from Duke University,
New York University and Harvard University say that foreign nationals living in
the US contributed to more than a quarter of new inventions with patents filed
last year. "Resident aliens" contributed to more than half of all the
international patents filed by a number of large multinational companies,
including Qualcomm, GE, Siemens USA and Cisco Systems. In addition, 41 per cent
of patents filed by the US Government had foreign nationals as inventors or
co-inventors, the report shows. The researchers say the loss of foreign-born
inventors would be detrimental to the US's economic wellbeing.